Squeezed out
Posted: May 17, 2013 Filed under: Affordable housing, Housing market, Private renting Leave a comment »Here are some thoughts on an event I’ve just chaired for the Resolution Foundation yesterday on the scale of the housing crisis and how to fix it.
Rather like most of my blogs, I thought it would be stronger on the first bit than the second, but the debate revealed a new willingness to look for solutions as well as more reasons to be gloomy.
The centerpiece was a sneak preview of some forthcoming research from the Resolution Foundation and Hometrack on the housing plight of low and middle income households. The foundation is a think tank focused on the 5.6 million people caught in the squeezed middle between stagnating wages and rising costs.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Dead cert
Posted: May 10, 2013 Filed under: Buy to let, Housing market, Private renting Leave a comment »So, three years after it was pronounced dead, can anything stop buy to let squeezing out owner-occupation?
Figures from the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) yesterday showed that loans to landlords accounted for 13.4 per cent of the £165.6 billion worth of outstanding mortgages in the first quarter of the year. That’s up from 13.0 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2012 and just 9.8 per cent at the start of the credit crunch in 2007.
All of which makes it easy to forget that it was only three years ago when the last rites were being delivered for buy to let by probably its best-known pioneers, Fergus and Judith Wilson. The former teachers built a 700-home empire but by 2010 they were bailing out and telling The Guardian that buy to let was ‘absolutely dead and will never return’.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Learning lessons
Posted: May 1, 2013 Filed under: Buy to let, Private renting Leave a comment »The plight of families with children highlighted in a report out today from Shelter illustrates yet again why private renting in England so urgently needs reform.
If the experiences of tenants facing damp and disrepair and soaring rents are depressingly familiar, the report adds detail to what has become a way of life for the one in five families with children who now rent their home privately.
The insecurity inherent in short-term tenancies means that one in 10 of 4,000 families surveyed have had to change their children’s school as a result of moving. They were nine times as likely to have moved in the last year as families who own their own homes.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Letting go
Posted: April 26, 2013 Filed under: Private renting Leave a comment »Things are slowly changing for the better for tenants in the private rented sector. It’s about time.
A series of small but significant things have happened over the last couple of weeks that suggest that even the government is waking up to the fact that it cannot continue to leave customers of a multi-billion pound industry to fend for themselves.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Waiting game
Posted: April 4, 2013 Filed under: Housing finance, Private renting Leave a comment »This week’s move by Prudential into the private rented sector one is highly significant for reasons that go far beyond the 500 or so homes involved in the deal.
First reported by the Financial Times on Monday, official confirmation of the Pru’s £105 million deal with Berkeley Homes is extensively covered in today’s papers. See Inside Housing’s story here.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
The rise of the property-owning plutocracy
Posted: March 8, 2013 Filed under: Buy to let, Housing market, Labour market, Politics, Private renting, Right to buy 12 Comments »If you had to think of one article of faith for the Conservative Party, a property-owning democracy would come pretty close to the top of the list.
David Cameron reached back to the idea in his ‘magic money tree’ speech yesterday:
‘It is important that people who work hard and do the right thing are able to buy a home. As I said in my party conference speech – it is a rebuke to those of us who believe in property owning democracy that the average age for someone buying their first home today, without any help from their parents is 33 years old. And we are determined to tackle that.’
The prime minister was clearly hinting at something to come either in the Budget or the housing announcement he’s planning just before it. Whether that’s a new stamp duty holiday, or an extension to FirstBuy or even perhaps making existing homes eligible for NewBuy remains to be seen.
Dynamic duo
Posted: March 6, 2013 Filed under: Housebuilding, Housing market, Mortgages, Private renting Leave a comment »So will the next big housing announcement from David Cameron and Nick Clegg amount to any more than the last three?
The Financial Times reported yesterday that the coalition double act are ‘drawing up schemes to revive the flatlining housebuilding industry and help people get on the housing ladder’. On the eve of the Budget on March 20 they will make a series of announcements including measures on shared equity schemes, social housing and support for first-time buyers.
Despite the scoop, even the FT admits that this ‘may be treated with some scepticism given that such announcements on housebuilding have become a regular feature of the coalition – while the industry has continued to stagnate’.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Owning fall-out
Posted: March 4, 2013 Filed under: Buy to let, Housing market, Private renting Leave a comment »Should we simply be accepting the continuing shift from home ownership to private renting as somehow inevitable?
That’s one of the many housing questions posed in the latest edition of the UK Housing Review. Now in its 21st edition and published by the Chartered Institute of Housing, the review has long been the bible for housing nerds but it is the best source of authoritative information on tenure and any other aspect of housing you care to think of.
The CIH has press released the story that home ownership has slumped among the young: from 39 to 14 per cent for the 16-24s and 67 to 43 per cent among the 25-34s. However, the rate is falling for older people too.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
One-way street
Posted: February 14, 2013 Filed under: Housing market, Mortgages, Private renting Leave a comment »Repossessions are at their lowest and loans to first-time buyers are at their highest since 2007. Has the housing market finally turned the corner?
That’s certainly one interpretation of stats released by the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) this week showing big improvements since the year the credit crunch hit.
On Tuesday it revealed that 216,200 first-time buyers became homeowners in 2012. That was a 12 per cent rise on 2011 and it’s the first time since 2007 that the annual total has exceeded 200,000.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
